Npr Series Gives Voice To Thoughts, Emotions Of Prison Life

January 8, 2001|By CHARLES STRUM The New York Times

John Mills, whose vocation is armed robbery, was a 21-year-old inmate at the Polk Youth Institution in Butner, N.C., last year when Joe Richman, a producer of radio documentaries, gave him a tape recorder and asked him to narrate his life.

In 30 hours of tape over six months Mills did just that, uttering unrehearsed soliloquies about his troubled past and his stifling present. "So my name is John Mills," he begins. "I'm 21. Black male. In prison.

"I wanted to be a police officer, you know what I'm saying? When I was small I used to think about that all the time -- be a police officer. All the sirens and loud noises and blue lights and stuff. That was just something I always wanted to be. But now I hate the police." He chuckles mirthlessly. "I know my life just took a big turn somewhere. I just don't know where."

For Mills, prison is a waste of time, "like playing a tape back or something -- same thing over and over again." But with his own cassette recorder and all that time, his cell became his Walden, a retreat from which to think about the world and his place in it.

That's what Richman was looking for, at Polk and at a juvenile detention center in Rhode Island: a handful of inmates and corrections officers who would reveal their lives in their own words -- no reporter, no narrator, no middleman to corrupt them.

The result is Prison Diaries, a five-part series on National Public Radio that began last week and continues with half-hour installments each Tuesday this month as part of All Things Considered, NPR's early-evening public-affairs program.

Richman, a 35-year-old Oberlin College graduate, has made a career so far as a radio Boswell, a biographer who stands aside and lets his subjects do the talking.

Whether it's teenagers or prisoners, the broadcasts allow listeners to eavesdrop on the aural journal entries of people they might not ordinarily meet. And because these personal revelations come without fanfare, the immediacy of each solitary voice can be startling.

"When you think about what radio does best, it's the characters and the intimacy of people telling their stories. There's no reason why the person can't speak directly to the listener. Radio's good when you hear them whispering directly into your ear," Richman said.

Here is Mills again, speaking to himself, and to the unknown audience:

"I was considered a criminal, if you knew me out there. Robbing was the best thing I did, you know? Robbing stores, robbing drug dealers, robbing the crack heads, robbing people that drove Lexuses. I robbed, between the ages of 15 and 17, the time I got locked up, I robbed about 75, 80 people. But in a way, sometimes I be thinking I'm glad. You know, I'm glad I came to prison. You know, I feel like if I would've never gotten caught, I'd probably still be out there robbing people."

Yet, he says later: "Robbing people was fun. Not like I'm proud of it or nothing. But when I was out I did love the thrill of it myself. And the look is always the first thing you get. Once you put the gun in their face. I always point the gun to the head, you know. It's always like a surprise and then they're frozen. I love the look in their eyes."

The project took Richman more than two years, from writing grant proposals to finding willing participants. Roughly 200 hours of tape had to be edited into 22-minute segments. Each segment features a different diarist or set of diarists.

"It takes so much more time this way, because we don't rely on narration to move the stories along," Richman said. "All of the stuff comes from their voice. We're hoping it gives a more natural feel, makes it feel more like a real story."